As taken from facebookMelissa Abrams finished retouching her coffee table this evening. Tomorrow: varnish wooden bench. Next week: stain dining room table and chairs. Next two weeks: decide and complete new flooring for screened-in porch.

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If anyone has varnish or stain recommendations (brand), please tell me! I have no idea what I'm doing.

The flooring is a little harder to figure out. Right now I'm leaning toward a vinyl "peel and stick" floor, for cheapness and ease. I've also thought about snap-together deck flooring (too expensive, too hard to do around the sides), simply putting a nice finish down (hard to do, especially on current paint-chipped, multi-colored surface), or putting more green carpet down (it was ugly before, it will get ugly again).

That's not for a little while, though, because I'd like to finish all the varnishing and such on my porch before I put new flooring down.

Suggestions are super welcome and appreciated on all of this. Know what's more welcome? MANUAL LABOR HELP. Seriously. I'll feed you dinner. We can sing. We will have a grand time! Plus, you love me. Right? I am looking at yellowducks231, pandora48sch, and reamens for sure. Also, since when is almost my whole LJ friends list out of town?

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Comments

I've always gone with Minwax stains. I trust them and they've never let me down. Depending on the type of wood you're dealing with you may want to pre-treat the wood (yes, there's a special type for wood-about-to-be-stained). It's pretty easy to figure out, it's all there together at Home Depot in the stain section. Also, don't forget the importance of proper sanding before pre-treating/staining. Sanding makes a WORLD of difference on your finished product. You don't want to go nuts and make crazy grooves in the wood, but you do want to make sure you've got a smooth plane on which to stain. Personally, I don't care for varnishes. I hate the sticky/shiny feeling of them.

Home Depot also carries some surprisingly decent vinyl flooring. Just do your research and figure out if you want a vinyl flooring that adheres to the sub-flooring (which depending on how "paint-chipped" it is could cause problems)or if you want vinyl flooring that floats (that is, it adheres to it's neighboring pieces of vinyl flooring - and may be your best bet).

Thanks for your advice! It's really good to hear from someone who has been doing all the home-improvementy stuff too :)

Maybe varnish isn't exactly what I want, now that I think about the stickiness. What I want is something that will keep the bench protected from the weather. Surely there must be some non-sticky variety of that.

I've looked quite a bit at floating floors, particularly the snap-together deck tile. I'm going to ask the Lowe's people for opinions on that, because I don't really get how they do corners/sides.

I think the paint chipping is mostly just ugly, not uneven. I'm pretty sure vinyl peel-and-stick flooring would adhere to it, as long as I clean and dry it really well first.